UPDATED June 3, 2018 – you can now add email addresses to cc or bcc in the configuration step. See updated code. The Opportunity Contact Role is an odd beast, perhaps because it exists largely for information purposes in the B2B sales world for which Salesforce is built, but takes on weightier roles in nonprofit […]

Imagine, if you will, a matrix report. . . You’re grouping by Account, but pulling in the Account Name via the Report Type layout, or perhaps a cross-object formula. And what happens? All your Brown Households get smooshed into one big Brown Household. A very generous household, based on the data, but not a very […]

I was designing a multi-year Donations matrix report based on an April – March fiscal year, with close date by fiscal month as the column headers, and fiscal years as the rows. One difficulty here is that Salesforce doesn’t want to put close date in both the column and the row headers, so I first […]

This is not general reading, despite my attempted literary reference in the title. This is a solution to a specific problem that I encountered, and that I’ll document here in case someone needs it later, since I failed to find the solution when *I* googled it. I had a process flow that was calling an Apex […]

For years, Google has given qualifying nonprofits a $10,000 monthly allowance to use Google AdWords to market their organization and work. The grants were limited by the amount you were allowed to bid for your ad placements, which made it challenging to compete with actual paid advertisers, but also asked little of the organizations — […]

Process automation is a prime example of how Salesforce gives admins a lot of control in an easy to master format. But, as with many things on a platform as vast as Salesforce, it can be hard to know where to start

On this episode of Workflow Rule Makeovers, we’ll take the default NPSP workflow for sending the email acknowledgement and make it into a process builder process that allows you to set criteria for using different templates.

For all of the awesome features and power of Salesforce, it doesn’t take an admin very long to run into something bafflingly underpowered. Like, for instance, email templates. Automated emails are easy to trigger based on sophisticated criteria, but giving those emails the personalized touches expected in this day and age? Not so straightforward.

Security and data access in Salesforce are controlled via a powerful and difficult-to-master set of tools. Profiles, permission sets, roles, role hierarchy, sharing settings, and page layouts are all part of the toolbox. They offer different capabilities, but also overlap and interact in ways that can be difficult to wrap your head around.

As part of my work to simplify the permissions and security regime for a forty-seat nonprofit organization, I put together this basic primer on these tools, in hopes of offering ways into this intimidating and mystifying terrain. This guide is written with the small-to-medium sized nonprofit in mind.